Homeward Bound

And then, one day, there was Stanford Dane—and eventually there was Abraham.

With Stanford everything was different, nothing unfolded according to the set plan, and, amazingly enough, Mrs. Childress purred through the whole process.

Dane came to Asheville at the height of an arts festival in which the new live drama theater was being launched. He came with a trumpet fanfare, striding in on a red carpet, as the guest stage director from Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore. Our mayor had seen a production of his in Baltimore and had begged him, histrionically, I’m sure, on bended knee to deign to deliver the first play in our new playhouse.

The great man of the American theater, Stanford Dane, arrived at the doorstep of the Swannanoa Boarding House for lodging during the preparation for this three-month festival running of his play. He hadn’t intended to board at the Swannanoa, and the flattery of my being the reason he did became part of the unnatural hold he eventually was to have over me. For the entirety of our relationship I lived under the misconception that somewhere under that controlling, consuming nature of his that he cared for me.

I didn’t notice him standing there, at the top of the stairs to the front porch as engrossed as I was in what I was furiously writing, trying to capture all that happened the previous night and the thoughts and emotions that it had evoked from me. It was Sunday. Mrs. Childress didn’t make us work the special services on Sunday, and she herself spent most of that day in prayer and praise up at the Baptist church at the top of the street. So, itching to try to capture—and to come to grips with the previous night’s event, I had taken my paper and pens to the front porch of the boarding house and was sitting at the table out there, deep in thought and in making a short, dramatic scene of it.

The previous evening, a Saturday, a man had arrived, almost hesitating as he mounted the stairs of the porch to the front door, at twilight. I was in the dining room, clearing up the last of the linen from supper and spied him through the window. He immediately arrested my attention because of the incongruity of him. He was finely dressed, as if he worked in one of the banks or attorney’s offices here, but he filled his clothes out to capacity—at least in the chest and arms—like he was a man accustomed to heavy-lifting, repetitive work. He was of pale complexion, though, so it would not have been work in the outdoors—and his hair, although curly and a light brown, was unruly about his head, as if he knew little of the grooming that went with the cut and quality of his clothes. He wasn’t old, but he must have been a good ten years older than I was. And I clearly could see him through the dining room window that wrapped around in a bay at the side of the front porch right next to the entry door. He had a sad expression on his face, which, though handsome enough, was marred by the squint of his eyes. The hand that was raised to the door knocker was rough and gnarled—another incongruity with the quality of his clothing.

In my writing of it, I spent considerable time on this entry into the scene, wanting to convey the mystery of him from the very beginning—the incongruities I instantly latched onto. Scrutinizing people as possible characters in my works had become second nature to me.

The mystery of it only deepened when Mrs. Childress responded to his heavy knock and I heard him ask in a deep, raspy voice, “By any chance does a young man named Charles Bairr live and work here?”

“Yes, he does. And is it about his work that you come here?” Mrs. Childress asked.

There was a pause, and then the man answered, “Yes, I guess it would be—unless you would just let me speak with—”

“That would be fifty cents for the room for no more than two hours, and a dollar fifty basic for Charles’s attentions—and seventy-five cents more for each time there is a . . . finish,” Mrs. Childress answered in an authoritative voice. Two dollars and seventy-five cents on nonreturnable deposit. I don’t think she had heard the man’s incomplete sentence. But I had, and I immediately thought that he must be shy and that in his hesitancy, I would either have to work extra hard to get my needed chalk mark out of him—Mrs. Childress did not like to entertain claims of return on deposit for incompletion of the basic expense—or he would come before he could get it out of his trousers. Most of the men were easy. They customarily were only there for immediate relief and then, almost in embarrassment at their own preferences, were dressed and away with nary a comment on the experience or my performance—or the fulfillment of the contract.

I was to find that Stephen Bander was there for relief but none that he could name or that I could provide.

The man said nothing further at that point. He just took out his wallet and doled three dollars into Mrs. Childress’s talons. Having looked into his wallet as he did so, Mrs. Childress gave the small smile that I knew indicated that she hoped he would become a regular visitor because he clearly had the means to do so. She became especially friendly to him because he made no indication of expecting twenty-five cents returned to him on the deposit—nor did Mrs. Childress volunteer to give him change. With Mrs. Childress, money moved in only one direction comfortably.

She led him into the foyer. The door closed behind them and I heard my name bellowed out by Mrs. Childress. I had stopped picking up the dinner linen at his mention of my name—most of my clients not wanting to know my name any more than they wanted to reveal their real name to me. Upon Mrs. Childress’s summons, I walked out into the foyer, expecting the man to say something to her or to me why he had asked for me by name. But he just stood there, staring at me. I sensed even then his indecision on whether to bolt out of the door or not. But he didn’t.

The man shuffled along behind us, down a corridor to the very private room, with its own full bath, including a large claw-footed bathtub—quite a luxury in those days—at the back of the bedroom wing. Mrs. Childress had found that a favorite of her new-service clientele was to be bathed—and more—in a porcelain bathtub. And Saturday night was a particularly popular time for this, the men being able to see to two of their basic weekly needs at the same time. I often thought that during that period I must have been the cleanest young man in Asheville. As we walked in the purposely darkened hallway, the man looked down at his feet, and although his physique was magnificent, as I could clearly tell, he was hunched over as an old man with many burdening sins.

When we were alone, he walked over to the nightstand and placed something on it that I assumed, upon getting a glimpse of it, was an envelope—hopefully with money in it. Then he returned across the room, as far away from the bedstead as he could get, and sat in a chair facing the bed. I started to undress.

“You needn’t do that,” he whispered. “I just want to look at you and perhaps talk a bit.”

“We must fuck or I will not be paid my share,” I answered, while I continued undressing, taking my shirt off my shoulders. I knew that I needed to put him into arousal or this would not be a good day for me. Mrs. Childress demanded seventy-five cents for the first ejaculation upon nonrefundable deposit, but I only got my share of that seventy-five cents if there was an ejaculation.

“Well, if you must—if we must. I suppose I would like to see what you have become. My name is Stephen, Stephen Bander,” he said. And he gave me a searching look as if that might mean something to me, which it didn’t.

“I am Charlie,” I answered, as I undid the belt to my trousers. For some reason I did not want to give him more—they rarely asked and I never wanted to allow them into the personal corner of my life. I never lied by giving a false name; this was not a large town. I left it up to them to cling to that false protection if they wished. In this case, my reticence was nonsensical, of course, as I had already heard him enunciate my name.

I spent considerable time at the table on the porch the next morning trying to get that part of the scene just right.

“I know. Your name is Charlie. Charles Bairr. With two Rs.”

I looked at him sharply as my trousers and underdrawers dropped in folds onto the floor around my feet, wondering how he knew about the two Rs.

But all of his attention now was focused on my naked body, and by his gasp and the intake his breath, I knew that he did want me. For the next nearly hour, I kept telling myself that. That he really had wanted me. It helped assuage the wound of rejection.

I cannot claim that I did not enjoy the trembling, hardening reaction I had on other men or that I found the act of lying under different men—and sometimes in quick succession or even in multiples—of any thickness or length repulsive or even of indifference to me. At no time did I become a numb prostitute, shutting my mind to what was happening so that I could endure it—or needing to pretend that I enjoyed it. I loved the looks men gave me when I stood naked before them; it didn’t matter how unattractive they might be. What mattered was that I was attractive enough to evoke a gasp from them with the effect my nakedness, my willingness to open my legs to them, had on them and on what was swinging—and rising—between their thighs. Their uncontrollable, naked desire was my arousal. And I loved being cocked—being held close and controlled and men becoming frenzied and captive of my sheath, not being able to get enough of me, of embracing me and moving inside me.

This perhaps was why I would melt at the likes of a black Samuel or an ugly-faced rough workman. If they were able to produce a hard pole for me to climb—the longer and thicker a challenge the better—their color or social standing meant nothing to me. The gasp and lustful look they gave me when I became naked for them and then the awe in which they regarded me when I lay back on the bed and opened my legs to them meant everything. Their involuntary hardness and their show of desire to have it inside me—that I had this involuntary effect on them—was all the arousal I needed. Their shudder and flow was my power over them and affirmation of my own worth to them—and therefore to myself.

I would never write of myself as a victim during those boarding house days—beyond the fact that I was being prostituted for the profit of others for something I’d be willing to give away for free for the mere award of the lust and want in a man’s eyes when I stood before him naked—and his resulting need to have his most precious possession churning up inside me against any and all dangers to his own position, well-being, or dignity.

Here, in my writing of the scene about Stephen Bander, I had to make a choice—whether to write this for an audience or just for myself. As I was trying to capture it faithfully for myself, though, I chose to baldly write it as it actually happened. This would be a play for my eyes only. I couldn’t expect others to understand, let along condone, my attitude toward the lusts and weaknesses of men—but I was compelled to burst out of the bounds of denying the reality of me at least to myself.

Stephen Bander wouldn’t make a move at that point and for moments afterward as he sat there, staring at me and saying nothing. Deciding he was not going to come for me, I walked to within his grasp—usually that’s all it took with the initially reluctant ones—and leaned over and took his finely cut jacket off his back and started unbuttoning his vest.

“You needn’t. We needn’t.”

“We must. As far as I know, she is watching from somewhere.” I wasn’t lying in this, although I never could discern the presence of an eyehole in the room, I sometimes felt an unseen scrutiny and certainly didn’t put the practice beyond Mrs. Childress’s capabilities or interests. There were times when men came to the house who I thought were of particular interest to Mrs. Childress, and often, when this was the case, she instructed me to take them to that small room of mine where the headboard would bang against the wall of her bedroom when set in a rocking motion and from where she could hear his rough talk and my moans.

“And at the end of your time,” I continued telling Bander, “there must be a chalk mark on the slate over the board. More than one, though, and you will have to pay seventy-five cents more—each.”

“More than once?” he asked in almost a gasp.

“The younger local miners can provide four or five chalk marks in the two hours,” I answered. It wasn’t a boast. It was the simple, sore truth.

He winced at that, and I didn’t know if it was from some feeling of inferiority at the number given or from the mention of miners. He certainly had the physique to rival any of the miners who regularly took out their week of tension on me on a Saturday night.

“A chalk mark?” His breathing was heavier now, because I had continued undressing him. I was kneeling between his spread knees and had his vest off and was unbuttoning his shirt—to reveal a barrel chest of much breadth and depth and nipples standing out strongly, signaling a need I knew he had even if he was denying it.

“Yes. It marks each time you . . . come. It must be at least once or I will not be paid.”

His breathing was ragged and he let out a little moan from the effect of my lips going to one of his nipples. My hands were unbuttoning the fly of his trousers, and a hard cock nearly sprang free upon release.

But when my lips went to it, it began to whither immediately.

“I’m sorry. Please. Perhaps too quickly. Could you just go over and sit on the bed for a minute? I will finish undressing myself and join you on the bed.” The voice was stressed, and deeply apologetic. I was afraid he would bolt for the door then and escape, so I did as he bid, determined to earn my share of seventy-five cents—I was only paid by the ejaculation; I received nothing from the payment for the room or my basic presence—and I was aware that I had to try to do so less directly with this one.

As I sat down on the bed, I looked down at what he had put on the nightstand. It wasn’t an envelope; it was a folded piece of paper, and it had my name written on it—correctly spelled and in a familiar hand that I thought I should recognize but could not, at that moment, put a name to. I quickly concluded that this is how he had known my name. I had been recommended to him—by name. I looked up from the paper and saw that he had finished undressing and was giving me a look that was more stressed than lustful.

He had a powerful body; he was not built especially large for fucking, but the massiveness of his chest and biceps and thigh and calf muscles were very pleasing to me. He obviously did—or had done—hard labor with his body, which was still hard muscle and no fat. His ribs and abdomen lay on his torso like he was wearing Roman armor, and I wanted to run my hands over him to determine that he wasn’t made of steel.

His cock was engorging again as he stood there and watched me stroking my own cock for him. As he walked toward the bed, I stretched out on the mattress and raised my arms, welcoming him to stretch out beside me in the double bed. As he did so, I moved my lips to his taunt nipples again and encircled his waist with my arms and palmed his well-rounded buttocks, which were as hard and unyielding as the rest of him.

Our cocks were resting against each other, and I brought a hand around and encircled them both as I started to move my mouth down his clavicle en route once again to the root of him. But even as I rubbed the two cocks together, I felt him going flaccid again.

He brushed my hand away and pulled me back up along his body until we were laying face to face. The hardness of his body was arousing to me. I was not sure what his problem was.

“Do you want me to . . . is it that you want me to cock you?” I asked this hesitantly. This sometimes was required of me—but not often. It was usually me they wanted to fuck.

“No. It is nothing. Just let me hold you a moment and look at your face. No, no,” he said with a sigh at length. “There is no similarity. I should not have come. Nothing alike. It would be a disloyalty. For me at least.”

As he was saying that, I had taken one of his callus-hard hands in mine and was playing with his fingers. That’s when I noticed them. They were groomed well enough and seemed to have been cleaned thoroughly. But there, at the base of the fingernail, where it met the flesh of the finger, the black line. The line of blackness that I remember being told a hundred times would not wash away once you had worked with it. Coal dust.

“How is it that you know my name? Who has recommended me to you?” I murmured, suddenly all attention, my mind racing on the possibilities.

“I cannot tell,” he whispered. “It would be a cruelty. I should not have come.”

I watched him from my reclining position on the bed, as he hurriedly dressed.

“I’m sorry. I cannot get the rise,” he told me apologetically when he was done dressing. “It’s not you. Oh, god, it’s not you. It’s me.”

“It’s all right,” I answered, trying to use my reasonable voice, wondering if there had been anyone else turned away who I could have made money off of—but principally lost in thought about what this could mean—whether I was letting my imagination running away with me and it didn’t really mean anything at all.

I saw him take his wallet out.

“You have already paid,” I said. “Did you forget. It is not that the house will not have its money—what has happened has more than fully been covered by the deposit you gave—it’s that I will not be given a share.”

But as if he hadn’t heard me at all, I watched him take five one-dollar bills out of his wallet and lay them on the nightstand by the bed and, almost in the same movement, take up the folded paper that was there and slide it into the inner pocket of his jacket. And then, in an afterthought, he reached up and marked a vertical line on the slate over the bed with the chalk.

Saying nothing else, he turned and left me alone in the room.

No one visited me that night, but he’d paid for his time, so Mrs. Childress was happy and I certainly should have been happy, as I’d received pay for more than a couple of days of fucking without doing it. But I spent that Saturday night, awake, knowing that the incongruous gentlemen with the coal miner’s fingers had left somehow unsatisfied—and something grated on my sense of pride. I did not feel diminished when a man fucked me; I felt diminished when his mind or body told him he would not. And the circumstances were such that my mind raced all night, setting forth the scene as well as my recalling would do—as a play. Certainly a tragedy rather than a comedy.

* * * *

“What is that you are writing so intensely that you did not heed my appearance on the stage, young man?”

The voice was booming, rich-toned, and although spoken jovially, its message had a touch of pique below the surface, leaving me red faced with the impression that I had committed some act of inconsideration by not having seen the man mount the stairs to the covered front porch of the Swannanoa Boarding House. And when I looked up, I felt doubly embarrassed, because such a magnificent figure of a man as this was due a welcome everywhere he went—and he clearly knew it.

“It is nothing. Just some scribblings,” I answered in a stammering voice. “If you are seeking rooms, you are free to sit a few minutes here on the porch. The proprietress, Mrs. Childress, is at church but should be back any moment now.”

“I prefer to stand,” he answered in the booming voice of his. And I could see why that was so. His appearance was so commanding, his attire so flamboyant and colorful, that he took center stage. Until his command of all about him was complete, he would be holding the spotlight. “And I am serious. What are you writing with such concentration? Are you a famous writer, my young man?”

“No, no, not famous at all,” I sputtered, looking up the full six and more feet of him, from highly polished boots and scarlet plush trousers to filmy and fluffy embroidered white shirt, covered with a shiny blue jacket cut high at the wrists and wide at the lapels to permit room for the white lacing exuberantly cascading there, past a finely chiseled face, with a flamboyant handle-bar mustache and thick, glowering eyebrows on to a healthy head of salt and pepper hair worn as a lion’s mane. If there had been a poster of Manifest Destiny in the making, he would have been the model for it.

“It is just a play. Something that popped into my head and I wanted to set to paper before it vanished. It’s rough, not good at all, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” he cried out. And before I could prevent it, he had swept the paper off the table and was poring over what I’d written. All the while, I cringed on the spot, deeply regretful that I had decided to write the scene faithfully—just for me.

But now this magnificent man was reading of things never spoken in Asheville—although, no one being able to attest to it as well as I could—not undone in Asheville.

“This is good, very good, lad. You write well. I am surprised—and delighted. Of course it could never be staged; the boards would go up in passionate flames.”

I was undone and could not reply. It was not the reaction I had expected at all. In his augmenting comments, he said nothing about the content—only about the delivery of the story and how well the characters were drawn.

“I am Stanford Dane,” he declared, saying it as if I should know who he was. And somewhere in the back of my mind there was a glimmer that I had, indeed, heard or read the name somewhere before. “And you are?”

“Charles. Charles Bairr . . . with two Rs,” I sputtered out. I have no idea why I spoke of my surname to him, let alone spoke the name at all. It was something in him, something commanding full attention to his needs and a natural desire to do whatever he wanted.

“Well, Mr. Bairr with two Rs, as I said, you write very well. I may need your services, if you will indulge me.”

It came out of my mouth, as by instinct, more than half wanting the experience of him, and once out I could not take it back. “I lay for two dollars and seventy-five cents by the two hours or five dollars by the night with unlimited privileges—but you would have to contract with Mrs.—”

I stopped dead at that point, though, seeing the expression on his face as it turned from confusion, to awareness, and then—to my utter dismay and embarrassment—to amusement. And then he roared with laughter.

“I mean not that, my good young man—my very good young man, apparently—if your writing isn’t more than half fantasy,” he boomed forth with a laugh. “I do not pay for what I want. I merely take it and receive undying gratitude in response. No, what I meant is that I am having trouble with the polishing of the play I am directing here for the festival. And I may need help from you, if you are capable of fresh ideas and wield a strong pen. And from this writing, I can tell that you may have such talents.”

Of course. Now I knew where I’d heard that name. He was the famous stage director the mayor had brought to town to open the new playhouse. But what was he doing here, at Mrs. Childress’s? Surely the town would be putting him up in the Battery Park Hotel.

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir. I would be honored, but what brings you—?”

“Why am I on the porch of this establishment?” he interjected. “Why, because as I passed I espied an angel with knitted brow and deep concentration. I was en route from the theater to my hotel. But now learning that this more convenient location is a boarding house, I think perhaps I may . . . Ah, would this be the proprietress you were speaking of mincing up the walk toward us?”

“Yes, sir. That’s Mrs. Childress.”

I could almost both see and sense him ratcheting up the charm—and I was thoroughly surprised that he had higher gears for that than I’d already seen and experienced—as he turned to face the approaching Mrs. Childress.

She was completely defenseless—and almost senseless—before the full force of his charm. She was undone and open to him for anything he wanted from the moment he opened his mouth and addressed her in courtly style with his rich, enveloping baritone voice.

Yes, of course, she would be delighted to have the visiting, famous stage director staying with her for the duration of the run of his play opening. What was the name of his play? Oh, Bound for Home? How intriguing; she must see it. As his guest? Opening night? She would be delighted.

Her simpering was something I’d never heard come out of her before. Thus, I was just surprised, not drop-down flabbergasted, when she asked him if two dollars a week would be satisfying for the room—her best room, of course. I was flabbergasted, however, when she said certainly, she’d be very pleased, if I would be permitted to help him as an assistant in the preparation of his play. The most flabbergasting part was that he made no offer of remuneration for my time—and neither did she set a price.

“No, thank you, Mrs. Childress, I wouldn’t dream of inconveniencing you further—young Mr. Bairr with two Rs can show me to my room, I’m sure. And he can go to the Battery Park for my trunk later, if that’s equally convenient.”

Mrs. Childress nearly stepped on her tongue in expressing how totally convenient all of this would be for her.

“It’s upstairs and to the left and down at the end of the long corridor, after a slight jog to the left, Mr. Dane,” I said as I led him up toward the second-floor landing. “Here, I’ll just turn on the hall light.”

“No need for that,” he said, as he came up beside me and palmed a hand possessively in the small of my back, propelling me a little faster than I had intended to walk down the hall. I could hear his heavy breathing in my ear. All of a sudden I wanted to get to his room as quickly as possible. I knew what he wanted and I wanted it too. He was such a lion of a man. It hadn’t been lost me that he’d declared he wouldn’t pay for it, and thus that was beyond considering or worrying about. It was just a question of whether I would let him fuck me—and, yes, I would.

We only made it to the turn in the hallway. He was ahead of me now, and fairly pulled me around the turn and slammed me up against the wall of the corridor, my cheek kissing the cool plaster of the wall and his pelvis pressing mine hard against the wainscoting. I could feel the power of him against the small of my back, ready for me.

I moaned as he rubbed his trouser-sheathed urgency on the small of my back.

“I did enjoy your writing, my young friend of the two Rs, and I especially enjoyed the content. I want to finish what you only got the start of in that scene, and I assure you I can give you full satisfaction and release.”

“Oh, sir, your room is just there. The door is just there.” It was quite clear I wasn’t saying no to him mounting me—that I was only suggesting that it be done in more privacy.

“Here is fine,” he muttered. “More drama. I like to fuck to the dramatic. The danger of detection. The anticipation of momentary discovery is all the more enticing. You’ll see.”

He was already pushing my trousers and drawers down over my slim hips, forcing them down without bothering to unbuckle my belt.

“You’ll want to step out of them,” he hissed in my ear. “You’ll want to stand as wide as you can. I promise you that.” As I did so, he leaned down and retrieved my belt, and before I knew what had happened, he had looped the belt over the metal of a light sconce above our heads and knotted both of my wrists in the dangling end.

I was spending more attention right after that, though, to his fingers at my channel. Invading and searching and widening. I almost cried out as his teeth closed on my neck. But I stifled the urge to scream.

He laughed, a low guttural laugh. “Exciting and invigorating, isn’t it? Having to mind how you respond to the element of surprise.”

I would have screamed then, despite any efforts not to, if he hadn’t closed a hand over my mouth as his cock started forcing its way up into me between his extracting fingers.

My mind immediately went to Samuel. This man was as long and thick as Samuel was. And almost as cruel in his fucking. I could tell by his own gasps and groans that he enjoyed having his cock just a bit ahead of my ability to open to him—that my own whimpers and groans and moans excited him.

“I expected you to be slack, boy,” he whispered in my ear. “But you’re tight. Yielding to me, though. Like opening a flower bud.”

When he was deep inside me, he stopped and held me there. “Under control, are we? No uncontrollable urge to cry out now?”

“No, sir, Oh, no sir. No need to cry. But you’re so big. So very, very—”

“But you like them big, don’t you, my boy? I read it in your play. Almost disappointment at finding the other man of average size. You loved the muscle, didn’t you? But there was a slight disappointment. The cock was not equal to the muscle in proportion.”

“You could read that?” I said, but then there was a catch in my voice, as I felt him push even deeper into me.

“Yes, and I shall not disappoint. You think I have bottomed, don’t you?” My whimper was the answer he sought. “If you think you can remain quiet and want more of it, I will turn you now, and we will fuck in a rhythm you will love. Do you want that?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

With that, he raised my legs off the ground, with strong hands on my calves, splitting my legs out and up and wide from my body, and crouching his pelvis underneath me and pushing farther, shockingly farther up into my channel with his cock. I gasped and he laughed.

After pumping up into me like that until I felt like jelly, he released my bound hands and turned me on his cock to where I was facing him. He’d unbuttoned his shirt to expose his barrel chest, with curly black hair peeking out of his arm pits and running under his pecs and down his sternum. I encased the small of his back with my legs and panted hard and tried to control my breathing and my gasps and gulps as he impaled me a good three inches more—my imaginings seeing not only his height as being over six feet—and began to raise and lower me on his cock as his hips entered into a piston motion that grew in intensity—and amazingly in depth as well—as I lowered my mouth to his nipples and dreamed of the satisfaction he was provided from reading of the previous evening’s strange aborting of consummation.

In a frenzy of a final moment, he spouted his seed deep inside me and then just let me slide down the wall and into a puddle at his feet. I looked up in amazement and through a haze of what seemed to be his cum swimming in my eye sockets, I moaned at seeing the size and girth of what he had been pumping up inside me.

“Very nice,” he murmured. “None of this to that bitch of a woman, though. As I told you, I never pay for it. But you will come for it when I call for you, will you not?”

“Yes,” I whimpered, my attention still glued to his monster cock.

“You will come to me whenever I have need of you?”

“Yes.”

“I think I will enjoy my stay here, then. I will see to the room myself. Go to the Battery Park for my trunk, please. And when you return, I want you to look at what is written for Bound for Home. We only have a few days to polish the script. And I also need a new Billy now. Nathan has not arrived. And I fear that he will not do so. Can you remember all of that?”

“Yes, yes, I think so, sir,” I answered as I struggled off the floor of the corridor and gathered up my trousers and belt and drawers.

“And mornings,” he answered as he opened the door to his room and turned to look at me. “I like to fuck in the morning. An invigorating start of the day. You may continue what you normally do in the evenings and at night. But I wish for you to be the one to bring me my breakfast tray and to do so when you have no pressing duties to attend to after you’ve brought it.”

* * * *

Stanford Dane made quite an imposition on Mrs. Childress’s schedules and rules—much of it on purpose, I suspected, as a symbol of his disdain for the woman—but she happily accommodated it all. I kept wondering if he was fucking her too, but I never saw a glimpse of a possibility when that could happen. Except when I was performing my abbreviated housekeeping and special duties, I was with Dane almost constantly.

Not only did I help him tone up the script for Bound for Home, but within a few days of his arrival, Dane had decided that I would be perfect to play the part of Billy in his play as well. I was willing to do it because Seth had told me that I couldn’t write well for the theater without having been on stage, and that had built in me a fear of my playwriting abilities that I wanted to overcome. I didn’t have any interest otherwise in being the focus of attention on stage. My preferred focus was naked and privately for men.

I thought Mrs. Childress would crack at the point of me being away for rehearsals on top of all the other demands Dane was making on my time and would lower the boom on him. But, although she did have a few choice words for me on my declining worth to her establishment, she continued to smile worshipfully on Dane. To be fair, it was quite a plum in her cap to have the distinguished visitor move from the Battery Park Hotel to her boarding house, but there was no end in the disruption he caused there.

There was the decrease in revenue—not only in less coming in from my special services account but also the best room in the house was tied up to accommodate Dane for a ridiculously low sum for the entire season. Beyond that, Dane had his breakfast and supper delivered to him—and he required the supper on demand rather than at a scheduled hour. He also tied up the good parlor whenever he required it. It’s where we worked together on “his” manuscript of Bound for Home, which increasingly was suspiciously closer to my own writing style and plot concepts than to his.

One element of the play was definitely his, however. He insisted on keeping what I thought was an overly dramatic ending—Billy preparing to shoot his lover to free him of the pain of a terminal disease in its advanced stage and then, by implication, turning the pistol on himself in what I called the Romeo and Juliet ending and for which, each time I mentioned it, I received a particularly sour look from Dane.

“It’s unrealistic. The audience won’t believe it,” I insisted.

“It’s the whole point of the play,” Dane countered. “It is just the sort of ending I’ve always dreamed of—and the rest of the play is there to build to this very moment.”

To give him credit, the audience loved the ending when we performed it, just as Dane insisted. But then, as I assured myself later in life, an Asheville audience isn’t anything like a New York City audience.

In all other matters, however, I was enslaved to Dane in that month of preparation for the play opening—and for weeks beyond. He not only was bigger than life—certainly bigger than anything living in Asheville—in personality and command of attention and fulfillment of all his wants and whims, but he also was an inventive and consummate lover. As I’ve already alluded to, he had the biggest, most talented cock I’ve ever known on a man—with only two black lovers in my experience coming anywhere close. He also, though, while being totally focused on receiving his own pleasure, was supremely capable of giving me pleasure too—and often in inventive ways.

I have no idea what Mrs. Childress chose to convince herself of for that hour it took me to deliver Dane his breakfast tray on most mornings and how she could pretend not to hear my obvious vocalizations of the taking, but she could hardly miss the way I stumbled out of his room, bowlegged and not able to walk a straight line, and humming myself silly with my eyes swimming in cum and a sloppy grin on my face.

In the end, of course, I think Mrs. Childress did profit well, because after Dane had left us, my clientele burgeoned and she realized she could raise her prices for the education I was giving many a simple quick-and-out-and-gone doggy-style taker in the many deeper pleasures and satisfaction that could be won with more sophisticated technique—most of which I learned from Dane. It didn’t take her long to take notice that I was recording two and three chalk marks for clients who previously were one and out in twenty minutes. The time factor was not quite as satisfactory, as clients were now coming to the two-hour mark with me more often than before. But they were also showing up more often. And, although I did not reveal this to Mrs. Childress, they were leaving me bigger tips as well.

After he was gone, Mrs. Childress occasionally remarked on how much time I had lost her while he was here, but I never apologized or stood long to listen to her. I knew that she knew that Dane had taught me to become exponentially more valuable to her—and more pleasing to the so-inclined gentlemen of Asheville. Although some of the other boarding houses were catching on and providing extra services themselves, for as long as I served at the Swannanoa House, none other came close to Mrs. Childress’s establishment in either reputation or revenue.

One might think from my earlier description of what happened on stage the night before the play opened, when Dane encouraged the other actor, Jim, to fuck me on the stage bed—or, rather, for me to ride his cock by my own effort, while Dane watched and built to an arousal to visit my room in the night, that Dane liked to share me with other men. But this event was an anomaly, no doubt brought on by the tension of the opening night of a play with Dane’s name on it both as playwright and director. And I believe it had originated in a small tiff Dane and I had had earlier that day when I, nervous at the coming play opening, snapped back at him when he asked me to perform some mundane task for him.

Never before and not after that did Dane knowingly permit Jim to fuck me. That Jim did on occasion was something that I tried—successfully, I think—to hide from Dane. I was especially careful to do this, because Jim had let slip that Dane had totally cut his relationship with Nathan, the actor who was supposed to play Billy in the play, but who never arrived in Asheville, because Dane discovered Nathan had another, secret lover—a woman.

As for women, I have always suspected that Dane arranged for the redirection of Betsy’s interest in me that she so openly expressed on the dress rehearsal night. After that night, I never found Betsy looking at me with awe and anticipation in her eyes. I did, though, see her gazing at the lighting man, Ed, with that aspect. I would not, in the least, be surprised to hear that, at Dane’s instigation, Ed didn’t take Betsy back to her boarding house that night but, rather, took her for a ride on his cock—and that she thoroughly warmed to him. In any event, there was no evidence that she was pursuing me from that point.

I must admit that, as enthralled as I was dancing my channel on Dane’s master cock, I developed a side interest that almost equaled what he did to me. But it was an interest that never could have developed any farther than it did in the Asheville of that day, although, considering where I eventually centered my life, that, perhaps, is the most ironic observation I’ve ever made.

In simple terms, Abraham Jackson was the milkman on the boarding house’s route. But nothing is quite as simple as it appears, even in Asheville on the cusp of the 1920s. Abe was the son of the man who owned and operated the dairy that supplied us our milk. And Abe was only helping out that winter because his father was shorthanded for help temporarily and Abe was able to take a semester off from his pre-law studies at Howard University in the faraway national capital of Washington, D.C., to help his father out.

Abe was a fine specimen of a young man, because he was on an athletic scholarship to Howard, where he excelled in his studies as much as he did in athletics. The most notable—and problematical aspect of Abe, however, was that he was black. He wasn’t ebony black as Samuel had been, but was a rich, milk-chocolate color from the inevitable mixing of races that occurred in the American south. The shade of black was not an issue in Asheville, though. Black was black and white was white and the mixing of those two didn’t occur in open society.

But Abe’s father was not one for the whites of Asheville to disparage. He was a man that Asheville couldn’t come to grips with—so they chose to politely ignore his circumstance. Even then, it could only have worked because he lived outside of the town, on a large farm, and because he provided the best milk available to those in Asheville—and because he was wealthy. But he had sinned. He was a white man who had lived with a black woman, calling her his wife. So, whereas Abe was half white, in Asheville he was wholly categorized as black—just like Samuel. Other than their classifications and how the white people of Asheville saw them, however, Abe and Samuel were worlds apart. Whereas Samuel was illiterate and crude, Abe was even more highly educated than I was—and most certainly from a richer family than I had been even when my father owned his mine—and more refined.

However, in one other respect, he was similar to Samuel. He had a jet-black dick that could fill me and stay hard and vigorous through two of my ejaculations. This I found out the day I asked him if I could see his system for arranging milk cans in the back of his truck—one of the first motorized vehicles I’d ever seen on the streets of Asheville, and then I’d cajoled him to take me on a ride to a deserted lane on the edge of the city, following which I’d convinced him he wanted to fuck me in the back of his father’s truck.

* * * *

“Yes, sir, it is a fine day.”

“How am I going to get you to stop calling me sir,” I responded jovially, while lifting the empty milk bottles out of the milk box on the back porch and handing them to Abe Jackson as he jumped out of the cab of his truck with six heavy milk bottles in his grip. I thought he looked just fine as he came out of the truck—and I admired the strength and dexterity he had to manage six full bottles at once. I was having trouble with the four empties I was dragging out of the milk box.

“Don’t want to be familiar where it might not be wanted,” he answered. “Here let me lift those empties out of the box. That’s what I get paid for.”

I didn’t put the empties back in the box, but I did put them down on the top step of the porch where it would be easy for him to get them on his way back to the truck. And as for wanting or not wanting familiarity, I wanted a lot more than that from Abe Jackson.

“Here, let me hold the kitchen door for you, Abe,” I said, “And then I’ll get the icebox door open for you and you can put them right in.”

“Much obliged, sir . . . Mr. Bairr. I’ll owe you one for your help.”

“Well, you could pay me back by giving me a ride in that contraption of a vehicle you have out there. You promised you’d do that someday. And I’m not Mr. Bairr to you, either. I’m just Charlie.”

“Thanks . . . Charlie”—this presumably for holding open the doors for him. “If you’re free, I could give you that ride now. I’m late in my delivery here, I know. But this is the last one on my route today. I could certainly take the long way back to the dairy if you’d like a ride.”

The long way to the dairy went out of town toward one of the lakes and then off on a dirt road that dead ended at the lake edge. Abe stopped near the end of the road just as another road branched off. The truck was facing the lake and had branches of trees almost touching it on two sides, but he wouldn’t have too much difficulty backing it into the other road for the turnaround for home.

“Gee, that’s certainly a smooth ride, Abe—and fast too. Thanks. And I didn’t think we’d make it down this dirt road. Sure is isolated here.”

“Yes, yes, it is,” Abe said, and the quiet, almost strangled way he said it made me turn in the seat and look at his face real closely. I held my breath, not being able to do much more than hope that what I thought I saw in his expression is what I saw.

“I’ll have to admit I saved the stop at your boarding house for last today—and hoped that you would be free to take this ride with me, Charlie.”

“That was good of you, Abe. I’ve been wanting to take this ride.” I looked down in his lap and saw that his trousers were tented—quite pronouncedly so too. I wondered if either one of us would make a first move—if we were both wondering if the other wasn’t interested in what we thought he was. Not sure whether I, at least, could risk it. If I was wrong, he could break me in two out here—and leave me for dead and no one was likely ever to know what happened to me.

But I ached for him now. He had a body that was worth the risk.

“You know, in exchange for this nice ride, I could give you a nice ride,” I said. The possibility of getting out of this if I’d guessed wrong was pretty lame—offering him a ride in Mrs. Childress’s two-horse buggy.

Abe lowered his head and didn’t speak for a moment, but I saw that he was fiddling around in his trouser pocket, digging for something. And I gasped—and almost laughed, in relief as much as amusement—when I saw what he came up with. It was eleven quarters.

“I hate to be so forward,” he whispered, “But word gets around. I heard that you’d do it for a man for two bucks seventy-five. If you don’t mind that I’m a—”

“Shush, now, Abe,” I said, moving the fingers of my hand to his lips, “Don’t say it. I don’t need your money. I’d pay you to do me if you wanted.”

He started to speak again—despite my fingers on his mouth—but then I stopped him more effectively by moving my lips to his and pushing his mouth open with my lips and slipping my tongue inside. That freed my hand to move down his now-heaving chest and to unbutton his trousers and pull a rock-hard cock out—an ebony cock as black as Samuel’s but, if anything, bigger. There may have been a fight among the genes throughout the rest of his body on what was white and what was black—in a breathtakingly handsome mixture—but his cock was unquestionably, powerfully black.

“Oh, Abe,” I said with a gasp. “I most definitely would pay you for the use of this.”

He moaned and cupped the back of my head with a huge palm as I began to slow pump his cock in my fist.

He was groaning and moaning even deeper as I moved my mouth down to envelop and suck on his cock, my fingers going to his equally black and heavy ball sac. The cock was so big and long that I couldn’t get it all into my throat despite the experience I had gained in this.

I didn’t let him come, though. When I had him worked up real well and felt sufficiently opened myself by the fingers of the hand he had snaked under my waistband in back and into my crack as I hunched across the seat on top of his lap, I lifted my mouth off his cock and turned my face to his. “Is there any room there in the back of the truck, or should we move down to the river bank?”

“I’ll make room.”

He fucked me first from behind as I was bent over a waist-high stack of milk bottle empties—which made a pleasant tinkling sound with the rhythm of the fuck. And then, when we’d both come and he’d recovered quickly, I told him I wanted to watch his eyes and his face—and the undulation of his massive pectorals as he fucked me again. Then I hopped up and sat on the stack of empties, my back rubbing against the side of the truck wall as I spread my legs for him and he stood between my knees and fed his cock in, in, in. I arched my back and cried out at how deep and filling he was and how I wanted him to mine me forever as I writhed under him and kneaded and prodding his muscles and tongued and teethed his nipples.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” I asked with a gasp when he’d ejaculated deep inside me a second time.

“Yes . . . is that a problem? Does that make it less—?”

“No. That makes it perfect. But you don’t mind that I’m—”

“You are an angel. It makes it glorious that you know how . . . so well. You’ve given me pleasure that no one . . . I have a confession to make here. I’ve known about you for some time and tried hard to think of a way to approach you. I couldn’t very well just walk up to the boarding house’s front door money in hand, could I?”

That didn’t really demand an answer. We both knew what would happen for a black man to walk up to a white establishment in Asheville and ask for what he wanted from me.

“You heard about me? Am I that famous in Asheville?”

“Well, you deserve to be. But you see, Samuel is my cousin. He told me that you gave pleasure better than any other man he’d had . . . and I didn’t have to take on the milk route. I did it because I thought it was the only way I could get into the house and to you.”

“And what Samuel said . . . was it—?”

“Yep, the best fuck I’ve ever had.”

“Then would you mind doing it again?”

The third time we did it on the riverbank as twilight stole in. The first two fuckings had been frenzied affairs, as if we couldn’t get enough of each other and there was a limited time to get satisfaction. This third time was as long-time lovers—slow, and deep, and him answering every suggestion that I had to make the experience the ultimate for both of us.

“Was it—?”

“Yes, of course it was,” I answered. “Couldn’t you feel that in my response to you? I do have one question, though?”

“Yes?”

I could feel the sudden tension in his voice. And I knew that apprehension about our different races—and what that meant in a southern town like Asheville—had stolen in to his mind.

“Yes. Just the one question—beyond can we do this often—and that is, are we familiar enough with each other now that you’ll never call me ‘sir’ again?”

He laughed at that, and I knew everything was all right. “Yes . . . sir,” he answered, and then, both laughing now, we stood and returned to the truck cab to retrieve our clothes and return to the real world.

I often wondered what he thought when he was driving away from the boarding house after leaving me off that evening and found three dollar bills lying in the passenger seat of the truck where I had been. He never said anything about it, but whenever I told him I needed what he could give me—a master cocking by my own choice—he gave it gladly and completely. And neither one of us talked about getting paid ever again.

* * * *

After that encounter in the back of the milk truck, I set up a place Abe and I could meet when the days weren’t too cold and Abe’s milk route wasn’t too demanding in the loft of the small barn behind the boarding house, where I showed Abe the new techniques Dane was teaching to me and Abe showed me that, although not nearly as long and thick as Dane, he was younger, more vigorous and could flood my insides in three quick successions in less than an hour—a feat Dane never attempted, being satisfied in sending me off after his own first ejaculation—whether I’d had one or not.

It was there, in the barn, me probably being too vocal in the fucking, that a curious Dane found Abe and me in the throes of passion within a week of the dropping of the last curtain on Bound for Home. Dane immediately stopped receiving his breakfast tray in his room and said not another word to me before, bowing to the applause of his adoring audience as he boarded the train for Baltimore, he had left Asheville for the larger world.

Two weeks after that Abe returned to his studies at faraway Howard University. And, although he said he would write me, I never received a letter from him. It was some time later that I discovered that Mrs. Childress intercepted his letters and burned them unopened—by me at least—until he just stopped sending them.

It might seem that my world had ended at this point—that it had already gotten as good as it was going to get and the rest of my time on earth would be spent dreaming about moving between the giant cocks of my histrionic master and my black lover. But that wasn’t the case.

Life at Mrs. Childress’s house returned to almost normal—but not quite, and in a good way. I was growing older and more assured, and my popularity in the underseam of Asheville life increasing gave me the upper hand with her. When Dane left, I, on my own, moved into the room he had vacated. Mrs. Childress threw a fit over this, of course, but I simply said that if she was going to charge more for my services and the men were leaving even more happy than ever before—and, most important, bringing other men into the house, then my work space was becoming a more important aspect of her business.

I added that if she didn’t like it, I would open my own boarding house. I wouldn’t, of course, because I didn’t want the burden of all of the mundane work that went with running such an establishment—not to mention the risk of the underbelly of the city turning as puritanical as its public face. But what was true, and she knew it, was that I could find another boarding house now that would be happy to pay me more than she did to take my clientele there. These realities shut her up, although she tried in every way she could to hold me in thrall to her.

I didn’t return to do any more of the boarding house housekeeping duties than I had been doing during the run of Bound for Home. Instead, I wrote more. The connection Dane had given me to the new live arts theater in the city—both in terms of acting and script writing—survived Dane’s departure, and, in fact, when I had been permitted to come out from underneath his cloak, the fair citizens of Asheville were dazzled to find that I was an “instant” playwright. Suddenly, two of my own plays appeared on the bill for the coming theater season—and I was to be the star actor in one of the plays I hadn’t written.

The irony was that the theater patrons in Asheville reacted as if I had suddenly blossomed from nowhere. They were oblivious to how much of Dane’s play they had seen was really mine—except for the ending they loved and I hated. This invisibility in the dazzling light of Stanford Dane was to follow—and irritate—me for years.

Other theater people of the region traveling through Asheville began to use the Swannanoa Boarding House both because Dane had lived here and because, when they asked me, I recommended it. This helped keep Mrs. Childress at bay as much as anything.

I had grown so confident in my writing that I even finished my long-suffering novel, The Boarding House, taking the writer Alec Cotton’s suggestion that I center it on one central character maturing and developing skill and confidence in the face of small-city adversity and the determination to overcome it and escape. I dug out the address he had given me, and I sent a laboriously typed copy of the much-revised novel off to him.

And then I forgot about it, as the rehearsals for the first of my plays in the Asheville Playhouse began to scream at me for every-waking-moment scrap of attention I could give it.